A journalistic investigation claims that the United States had advanced an agreement to extradite and prosecute gangs, until the Salvadoran president sealed a pact with the gangs, removed the attorney general and hundreds of judges, and got the Court authorize his re-election.
The latest U.S. warning to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele came from the voice of Juan Gonzalez, a national security adviser and one of the men who speaks most closely to Joe Biden on Latin American issues. Washington, Gonzalez said, will take action in the face of Bukele’s flirtations with re-election. It’s not the first time the United States has warned, but so far little has changed in the authoritarian script of El Salvador.
Gonzalez said Bukele “must answer” for the decision that the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice, the five magistrates were imposed last May by deputies akin to the president: last September 4, the chamber made an interpretation of the Constitution that opens the possibility for the re-election of Bukele in 2024.
“We have various elements, visas, sanctions and there are other tools,” Gonzalez told the Voice of America.
First of González had responded, in San Salvador, Jean Manes, the manager in charge to whom Biden sent to the Salvadoran capital shortly after assuming the presidency in Washington.
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Manes used the word “condemnation” when referring to Bukele’s policies and decisions, an escalation in the diplomatic language used by the United States so far. “This decision allows for immediate presidential re-election and is clearly unconstitutional,” Manes said within hours of the Bukelista court’s decision being made public. For the first time, Washington referred to the Salvadoran political situation as “a decline of democracy that damages the bilateral relationship.”
Beyond public warnings, as confirmed by Infobae in the US capital, the Biden administration and Democrats in the lower house of Congress are discussing options to put pressure on Bukele.
Possible tools that González talks about include economic sanctions, criminal charges on American soil to officials linked to the pact that the Salvadoran government maintains with the MS13 or the withdrawal of more visas to deputies, magistrates and ministers of bukelismo, as a handful of people who have participated in these discussions have told Infobae, including contractors specializing in the Central American region, legislative assistants and diplomats in Washington.
The pact with MS13
Bukele’s outbursts of anti-democracy have been undermining his dialogue with Washington little by little, but nothing has been as detrimental to the relationship as the Salvadoran government’s pact with gangs in his country, especially the MS13. to keep homicide rates down.
So far, U.S. officials have been cautious in referring to the Bukele gang pact, but far from the public eye, a task force, populated by State Department agents, The FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) have been gathering information on meetings and conversations between MS13 leaders and Bukele officials, such as prison director Osiris Luna, for at least six months, an assistant confirmed to Infobae legislative, a diplomat related to Central American issues, and a State Department contractor on condition of anonymity.
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Prior to May 1, when the newly sworn member of the Constitutional Chamber fired the attorney general and Supreme Court justices, the United States had maintained a fluid dialogue with Raúl Melara, the dismissed prosecutor, in the MS13 topic.
It was on that day, when Bukele began what Manes describes as the “decline of democracy.”
A few weeks before that, in early April, Ricardo Zúñiga, then Biden’s special envoy for the North American Central Triangle, had visited El Salvador to address issues such as the rule of law in the country. Bukele did not receive it. Zúñiga flew back to Washington with Raúl Melara, who was still the attorney general.
Legislative Palace just ten days from the coup in the Judiciary that was given here. PHOTO EDH / Jorge Reyes
Sources close to Melara and the United States government have confirmed in the middle the agenda of the Salvadoran official who on this visit was presented with the extradition requests of 13 members of the MS13 gang that, in December by 2020 and January 2021, they had been accused of terrorism by the United States. Melara affirmed her support. A similar endorsement was lacking from the then president of the Supreme Court of Justice, Óscar Pineda. A source close to the office of this former magistrate said that Pineda would also give his approval.
It seemed the end of a path that U.S. prosecutors and judges in California and New York had begun to walk in 2016, when MS13 recruits were convicted of several murders on Long Island.
But it arrived on May 1, 2021. In El Salvador, the majority of the party New Ideas of President Nayib Bukele took office, which, in its first official act, dismissed Melara, Pineda and to the other magistrates, so that, besides the continuity of the constitutional regime, the route in the extradition of the ranfleros was in suspension.
On June 10, the full Court (15 magistrates) had agreed to endorse the extradition of Armando Eliú Melgar Díaz, alias Blue and leader of the MS that the United States accuses of terrorism. In late August, however, Bukele’s magistrates arrested Blue’s extradition.
It all happened in the middle of the pact between the Bukele government and the gangs, documented by prominent American agents in San Salvador and revealed by journalistic investigations by the Lighthouse and La Premsa Gràfica, which prove meetings between Osiris Luna Meza, the director of prisons of Bukele, and several MS13 leaders.
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Since at least March this year, U.S. judicial and police officers have been gathering information and testimonies about the Bukele gang pact, meetings of executive officials with leaders of the rampage in prisons, permits of exits of the gang leaders of the prisons. These investigations, as confirmed by Infobae, are open.
A sweet relationship that soured
In March 2019, as president-elect, Bukele traveled to Washington on a tour that took him through congressional offices, from the administration of then-President Donald Trump, and to give a speech at the Heritage Foundation, one of the quarters intellectuals of conservatism in the United States.
In Heritage, Bukele spoke of democracy, the fight against corruption, condemned the regimes of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, and called Salvador’s diplomatic relations with China untransparent. Juan Orlando Hernández, the president of Honduras, was called a dictator. Jean Manes was then the appointed ambassador to El Salvador, and it was she who opened most of the gates to Bukele on the banks of the Potomac River.
“He said what we all wanted to hear,” said a former Trump administration official who was at the meeting.
By December 2019, Bukele was sending other signals, some of them far from what Washington wanted to hear. That month, the Salvadoran president, already sworn in, visited Beijing, where he received all the honors and even an honorary doctorate. In the Chinese capital, Bukele spoke of a “historic rapprochement” between the two nations.
Ambassador Manes was replaced by Ronald Johnson, a colonel assigned to the Southern Command linked to the intimate circles of trumpism. Johnson and Bukele became friends. A former diplomat assigned to El Salvador told Infobae that Johnson helped Bukele weather the first storms in Washington that had led to reports from the embassy in San Salvador about the dealings between the government and the gangs, which the then ambassador knew and preferred to ignore.
With the arrival of Biden in the White House the matter changed: the Department of Justice and the State Department resumed data on the negotiation and deepened the investigation into Bukele officials. The final results of these inquiries are still unknown.
The first major public reprimand from the White House came after the May 1 legislative coup. On May 2, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken spoke with Bukele to express his “deep concern” over the changes.
Shortly afterwards, on May 12, Zúñiga returned to travel to San Salvador to reiterate the message to Bukele, who this time did receive it. Here, Biden’s envoy warned that Washington understood that the status quo prior to the May Day coup was what the White House recognized as respectful of the Savior’s Constitution. Bukele’s response came in a tweet: “We will not go back to the past,” the president wrote in his account hours after receiving Zúñiga.
Washington responded by including five officials close to Bukele on the so-called Engel List, drawn up by the State Department to appoint officials identified for acts of corruption or crime, whose entry visa to the United States has been revoked. .
Since then, Bukele’s authoritarian escalation has continued in the form of more attacks on the press, imprisonment of opponents, and inconsistent enactment of laws, such as the one that gives life to the circulation of bitcoin as a legal tender.
For a time, other foreign policy issues, most notably the departure of U.S. troops from Afghanistan after twenty years of military presence, diverted the attention of the State Department. That, according to a U.S. diplomat who was prominent in San Salvador and knows current discussions about the Central American country, changed when the Supreme Court led by Bukele paved the way for re-election.
“The State Department has refocused on El Salvador. Afghanistan has been the priority, but Central America is just around the corner … And Bukele has crossed lines that had not crossed before. in El Salvador since the signing of the peace, ”says the diplomat, who spoke with Infobae in the US capital.
This source coincides with the others consulted for this report: Washington looks closely and has a bunch of options ready to answer.